If you're anxious about life today, TV this fall is inviting you to journey to a happier time. A time when ketchup was a vegetable, when Saddam Hussein was a strategic ally, when children went to school, teenagers courted and families thrived with no greater worries than the possibility that they might at any moment be incinerated in a global nuclear war. If programmers are correct, the state of the American psyche is such that suicide attacks and anthrax ...

With the exception of Madame Defarge, the vengeful knitter of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, needlework has never been the most revolutionary of pursuits. Slow, laborious and meditative, it's everything contemporary culture is not. But recently knitting — and its even squarer cousin, crocheting — has gotten something of a rebellious name around town. That name is yarn bombing. Yarn bombers take their craft to the streets, stitching cozies for bike racks, stop signs and sculptures. They knit ...

If Private Jeon is celebrating inside, his disciplined military exterior doesn't show it. Dressed in khaki with black, wide-rimmed spectacles, the 22-year-old is due to finish his 21 months of military service next month, an obligation for almost all of South Korea's 25 million men. "It's good experience for my job," Jeon says during an educational tour of the Demilitarized Zone, the barb-wired no-man's land that has divided the Korean peninsula for 58 years and counting. "Frankly," ...

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafs known in the South Korean capital as "PC Bangs," Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies. His idols aren't your usual baseball players or pop-music stars: the high school student looks to inspiration from ...

Many an upper-class, conservative Negro, embracing the doctrine that the white man is superior to the black, accepts Nordic standards, regrets his dusky hue, shapes his life toward proving that his soul, at least, is white or near-white. More radical Negroes, notably the younger school of Negro writers, resent the assumption of white superiority, feel that black culture is different from but on an equal plane with white, maintain that the future of the colored race lies in its proudly ...

It took Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw only 14 days to secure his place in Indian history. The career officer, who died June 27 at 94, had a mystique as thick as his silvered mustache, after fighting heroically against the Japanese in World War II. But his defining moment came with the Indian army's decisive victory in the two-week 1971 war against Pakistan. For a country that had been mired in seemingly endless battles on its borders for most of ...

Here's a tale for our times. Last week Ali Abbas, the 13-year-old Iraqi boy who lost his arms during an air raid on Baghdad, continued his recuperation in a hospital in Kuwait, wearing a T shirt emblazoned with a picture of his hero, an English soccer star who was about to start a promotional tour of Japan after having just been traded to a Spanish club in a deal--vital to the fortunes of a German shoe company--that merited an editorial ...

Only three shows left. Can you stand it, America? Even in a pop-culture world oversaturated with grandiose farewells and memorial tributes, the thunderous countdown to the last episode of Oprah Winfrey's 25-year-old talk show is something to behold. For weeks, she has been revisiting old friends, replaying favorite segments, reliving teary memories. On Monday and Tuesday, she'll air two shows edited from last week's celebrity-packed extravaganza taped at Chicago's United Center. Then, on Wednesday, the really, truly last ...

Once upon a time Americans had a culture of food to guide us through the increasingly treacherous landscape of food choices: fat vs. carbs, organic vs. conventional, vegetarian vs. carnivorous. Culture in this case is just a fancy way of saying "your mom." She taught us what to eat, when to eat it, how much of it to eat, even the order in which to eat it. But Mom's influence over the dinner menu has proved no match for the ...

The wrong people, the wrong drugs have taken over. English majors , fraternity boys and the down-and-outers who would have been bums anywhere are joining the culture. The aggressive psychotic drunk has sprung up now in the drug culture. Heroin and speed have replaced marijuana and LSD. Hippie violence against hippie has become commonplace. It is numbers: too many hippies. We can only afford so many people alienated from society. These are the words of Charlie Whitman, hippie lawyer from ...